Exploring Embryo Technology

Saturday - September 2 2023, 15:42 UTC - 1 year ago

This week, a story was published about the results of a study on Parkinson's disease which transplanted dopamine-making neurons into people's brains, utilizing tissue from embryonic stem cells. Stem cells have yet to produce any approved medical treatments but the study was able to pass the earliest stage of safety testing. Billions of dollars have been plowed into embryonic stem cells, yet nothing successful has been crafted yet due to manufacturing issues. Despite this, stem cells are still seen as technology as they are immortal and can be used as reproducible material. This type of technology has the potential to hold clues to real rejuvenation science.

This week, I published a story about the results of a study on Parkinson’s disease in which a biotech company transplanted dopamine-making neurons into people’s brains. (You can read the full story here.) The reason I am following this experiment, and others like it, is that they are long-awaited tests of transplant tissue made from embryonic stem cells. Those are the sometimes controversial cells first plucked from human embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures 25 years ago. Their medical promise is they can turn into any other kind of cell.

In some ways, stem cells are a huge disappointment. Despite their potential, scientists still haven’t crafted any approved medical treatment from them after all this time. The Parkinson’s study, run by the biotech company BlueRock, a division of Bayer, just passed phase 1, the earliest stage of safety testing. The researchers still don’t know whether the transplant works.

I’m not sure how much money has been plowed into embryonic stem cells so far, but it’s definitely in the billions. And in many cases, the original proof of principle that cell transplants might work is actually decades old—like experiments from the 1990s showing that pancreas cells from cadavers, if transplanted, could treat diabetes.

Cells derived from human cadavers, and sometimes from abortion tissue, make for an uneven product that’s hard to obtain. Today’s stem-cell companies aim instead to manufacture cells to precise specifications, increasing the chance they’ll succeed as real products.That actually isn’t so easy—and it’s a big part of the reason for the delay. "I can tell you why there’s nothing: it’s a manufacturing issue," says Mark Kotter. He’s the founder of a startup company, Bit Bio, that is among those developing new ways to make stem cells do researchers’ bidding.

While there aren’t any treatments built from embryonic stem cells yet,when I look around biology labs, these cells are everywhere. This summer, when I visited the busy cell culture room at the Whitehead Institute, on MIT’s campus, a postdoc named Julia Juong pulled out a plate of them and let me see their silvery outlines through a microscope.

Juong, a promising young scientist, is also working on new ways to control embryonic stem cells. Incredibly, the cells I was looking at were descendants of the earliest supplies, dating back to 1998. One curious property of embryonic stem cells is that they are immortal; they keep dividing forever.

"These are the originals," Juong said.

That reproducibility is part of why stem cells are technology, not just a science project. And what a cool technology it is. The internet has all the world’s information. A one-cell embryo has the information to make the whole human body.

It’s what I have started to think of as "embryo tech." I don’t mean what we do to embryos (like gene testing or even gene editing) but, instead, the powerful technology researchers can extract by studying them. Embryo tech includes stem cells and new ways of reproducing through IVF. It could even hold clues to real rejuvenation science.

For instance, one lab in San Diego is using stem cells to grow what they call organoids. They’re miniaturized, lab-made bits of brain or gut. But come 2030, researchers might eventually use organoid technology to make complete organs, even entirely new lives.